Introduction: This presentation will focus on the content of PhD project of the first author who has had extensive experiences of working in American schools within underserved (i.e., poor) communities. In spite of lacking resources, some of these schools are able to contribute into developing high performance athletes in various sports (including racket sports) and empowering them to achieve the success against the odds. These real life examples served as an inspiration to investigate such athletes’ career pathways and environments in which they had grown up.

Aim and theoretical framework: The aim of this project is to acquire knowledge regarding the challenges and barriers faced by athletic talent development environments in underserved communities (UATDEs) and how successful UATDEs manage to help athletes achieve athletic and personal success against the odds. The study is based on the holistic ecological approach (Henriksen, 2010; Henriksen & Stambulova, 2017), and particularly on the athletic talent development environment (ATDE) model. The model was previously applied to study ATDEs in Scandinavia with its high social and economic equality. Conversely, in the United States, with its large income gap, many underserved communities struggle to produce elite athletes, and little investigation has been conducted surrounding such environments.

Project design and method: The project will consist of three studies. Study 1will focus on exploring career pathways to athletic success and related environmental and personal factors in American athletes with low SES background through a series of interviews. Another series of interviews will be used in Study 2 to examine key stakeholders' perspectives on challenges faced and strategies implemented in UATDEs. In Study 3, the case study approach will be used to investigate two successful UATDEs within American communities and identify shared features responsible for their talent development success.

Expected results: It is expected that Study 1 will reveal that athletes at the UATDEs were forced to deal with hardship and overcome a number of challenges that made them more resilient compared to those from affluent circumstances. From Study 2 it is expected to identify a spectrum of complicated issues (e.g., lack of funding, less access to practice time, lower moral, high stress and low levels of communication and support) that the UATDEs deal with. The anticipated results from Study 3 are that successful UATDEs have unique but also shared features that may form the basis for developing UATDE frameworks as an expansion of the holistic ecological approach.